Women who would otherwise have been housewives

[David] Willetts blamed the entry of women into the workplace and universities for the lack of progress for men.

“Feminism trumped egalitarianism,” he said, adding that women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men.

Yes, and working-class men who would otherwise have been miners had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious women. What about it?

Everybody could always have been and done something else; so what? It’s no more inevitable or Right or How Things Ought to Be that women “are” housewives than it is that working-class men “are” miners. The university places and well-paid jobs don’t somehow belong to men, and women aren’t stealing them if they try to get them too.

Women who would otherwise have been housewives would have been housewives because things were rigged against them. That’s what that “otherwise” is pointing at. Willetts is thinking back to a time when it was just taken for granted that women would “be” housewives and that they would not “be” anything else, especially not anything demanding brains and hard work, and he’s thinking of it as if it were a natural or default state which we have now weirdly departed from, with the result that women are grabbing jobs that should have gone to men.

It looks to me as if David Willetts grabbed a job that should have gone to someone who doesn’t think that way.

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60 Responses to “Women who would otherwise have been housewives”

People who buy lottery tickets are taking the chances away from winning from ME, the other person who buys lottery tickets. They should just stop, so I can be the only lottery-ticket holder, and as a result, will win the lottery. They’re stealing from me.

Willetts is thinking back to a time when it was just taken for granted that women would “be” housewives and that they would not “be” anything else, especially not anything demanding brains and hard work

Willets is 55 years old. I’m going on 72. I’m 16 years older than he is and I don’t remember a time when the above was the norm. It was before my time, maybe before WW2 even. When I was a child women worked, men worked and some of the men and some of the women had very good jobs, some not so good. Perhaps it was different in the upstairs/downstairs world of a Willetts in which case I nominate him for “Upperclass British Twit of 2011″…..

Willetts is Universities Minister. He appears to be arguing that women should not get tertiary education in the interests of – wait for it – egalitarianism!

Ophelia, your citation of God’s grief is well justified.

However, this needs to be seen in the context of justifying the lunatic spending cutbacks the UK Conservative government is running at the moment. Moreover, Willetts is clearly testing the political wind, or flying a kite as they say. One likely Tory hope with its results collapsing in the opinion polls is division of lower-income households on sex lines. (‘Women vs men over jobs. That should fix the buggers!’)

It is either a justification for cutbacks already done in university spending, or a herald of you-ain’t-seen-nothin’-yet cuts to come. Or both.

In this context it’s worth reading Johann Hari’s piece thism morning on the silence of Ed Miliband, the Labour leader.

sailor, it was the norm, although there were exceptions. That’s why second wave feminism got going. There were all sorts of informal obstacles to women doing much of anything beyond teaching school and nursing – informal obstacles like not hiring them and not promoting them. There was also an avalanche of “family values” propaganda in the 50s.

I’m sick and tired of people who think that jobs and rights automatically belong to one group (one race, on gender, etc.) and get upset when other groups want equal rights and opportunity. Why is every problem on the planet now blamed on feminism, secularism, and homosexuality?

Trust the Tories! It’s almost unbelievable coming out with this at this stage of the game. What are they really working themselves up to, though? After all, it’s the Tories who have been claiming, basically, that the poor are responsible for their poverty, isn’t it? Time to get people off the dole! And now they’re giving them an excuse! How will they square that with their party manifesto? I’m only looking at the situation from a distance, but am I wrong in thinking that this government has still not really found its feet? After all, haven’t they just cut back on the armed forces? — retired an aircraft carrier, sacked some pilots — one place where working men have traditionally found a way out of poverty. I suppose the forces are now co-ed too, so that’s a whole lot of jobs gone to women who should be housewives! Dear me — time to bring back the three Ks (in Scots or German — Kids, Kirk and Kitchen!)

Well, Felix, I would say that too — we crossposted — but, really, there are better ways of saying it than remarking on “women who used to be housewives”. It’s the way it’s said, and the traditional associations of that kind of language. And when a Tory government spokesman says it, it has a different resonance (to advert to the UBC idea of bodies and public spaces).

1: a belief in human equality especially with respect to social, political, and economic affairs 2: a social philosophy advocating the removal of inequalities among people

So, how is it against egalitarianism? Seriously, how? I know crap like quotas is against egalitarianism. But considering that in my wife’s field — developmental biology — a woman, to get tenure, generally has to have twice the publications of an otherwise similarly qualified man.

Or, as Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Just that despite the benefits, certain undesirable effects were also produced.

Which would, essentially, be less qualified and talented men getting jobs that more talented, but forced to waste their talents, women wouldn’t get? Sorry, my grandmother J. lived that life. A brilliant woman who, had she been a man might of been a dual-PhD nuclear physicist/nuclear engineer like her oldest son. Or get full-ride scholarships to medical school like her younger son.

No, she was a girl. And got yanked out of school after 8th grade because ‘education was wasted on a woman’ and she needed to get ‘her head out of books’ and on the serious job of ‘taking care of her faimly responsibilities’ because that was, of course, her lot in life.

So, I don’t consider less talented men not getting a job over more talented women an ‘undesirable effect’ vis the concept of egalitarianism/meritocracy where the best person gets the rewards.

I think that you are arguing against a point that nobody is defending i.e. that improving opportunities for women was a bad idea.

“I don’t consider less talented men not getting a job over more talented women an ‘undesirable effect’ vis the concept of egalitarianism/meritocracy where the best person gets the rewards.”

In a society with an entrenched class structure manifested by large income inequality, for the government to have a goal to reduce inequality seems valid.

(As a European liberal I can say this, although to a certain section of Americans I may appear to be a Communist-Facist-Pinko-Liberal)

Then, 40 years later, saying “Hang on a minute. This doesn’t seem to be working.” and analysing what happened seems appropriate.

And if what happened was (hypothetically):

1) We increased educational opportunities for the bottom 33% of the population.

2) We increased university places by, on average, 3% pa for 40 years.

3) The life expectancy of the lowest 33% has increased by 10 years.

4) The number of university graduates from the lowest 33% has quadrupled.

Then you may think that you have done well.

But if you then try to explain the increased inequality you find that (point by point):

1) Despite this the gap between lower class and middle class has increased due to private education, moving to areas with good schools and better home and preschool opportunities for middle class kids.

2) Many more of these university places were filled by middle class women, rather than working class women or men.

3) The life expectancy of the other 66% has increased by 20 years

4) But it was ridiculously low to start with.

We may then … Sorry? ‘Stop’ you say. Why? Did I say something controversial?

How does more equality of opportunity for all, that is feminism opening up doors barred by gender and gender roles, decrease egalitarianism for all?

I know how it’s being tortured and perverted by Willetts that the large increase in egalitarianism/meritocracy for women has reduced opportunities for men. And while it is undeniable that some less talented men may (doubtful though) have become ‘losers’ in the job hunting game, if you compare just two data points in any job interview situation, the fact is that it’s not actually true when one looks at the large economic data over time — because the truth is, it’s not a zero sum game in the large population.

In 1900 only 19% of women were in the workforce. And their roles and opportunities were heavily restricted. Eighty-percent of men were in the workforce. By 2007, 73% of men were in the workforce, a trend caused by longevity of the male population, not feminism. In the mean time, 60% of all women were in the workforce as well and they were, while not fully equal, participating at all levels.

Now, while it’s obvious to me, not everyone really thinks about the economics of the increase in the labor pool. Simply put, more people working causes more economic activity, causing more consumption, causing more economic activity… This, in turns, creates more opportunity. It almost goes without saying that much of our economic growth in the past 50-years has been fueled by women entering the workforce in large numbers, including the vast expansion of our work force and work-force opportunities. An increase that would have been substantially throttled without that increase in the participation of women.

Also, the academic position argument is exceptionally stupid, in my opinion. The same labor force drivers and concepts apply, however, it’s even more heavily influenced by the participation of women than the labor force in general. And, even so, women do not make up fifty-percent of academicians, even though it’s their vastly increasing participation that drove the huge increase in professorships.

So, if anything, feminism breaking down barriers has either done nothing or, more likely, increased the academic opportunity for these gentlemen, not limited it. Men are going to college at the highest rates they’ve ever gone, and women are the majority of students. Clearly in the need to teach these women vast numbers of academic positions have been created. More of which have been been filled by men than by women.

The numbers are clear, these hypothetical ‘victims’ are, in fact, real-world professors that, without feminism and its rewards, wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become professors. All because of women going to college. Really ironic, don’t you think?

So, in the end, egalitarianism and meritocracy are not concerned with gender or race issues. They are concerned with equality of opportunity to all peoples. And while we will never live in a purely egalitarian society, feminism has not decreased western civilization’s egalitarian. The data is just too overwhelming to conclude otherwise. Especially in academia.

Or, to put it differently: Willets is a fool if he thinks that a gender hierarchy is any more egalitarian than a class hierarchy. He’s a fool if he thinks “middle-class” and “working-class” people have separate economic and political interests but men and women don’t, and so middle-class people shutting out working-class people is somehow more of an evil than men shutting out women.

@Felix (comment #11): I read the blog post you linked to. I can understand what the author is saying about a household with two high-earners having much more than a household with two low-earners, and how this gap can be greater when compared with one high-earner vs. one low-earner. I understand the point about the educational opportunity benefiting those who are already in the upper or middle class and not benefiting those who earn less. Isn’t this an effect of some people in the upper class (regardless of gender) not caring about those who have less and not being interested in expanding educational opportunity to benefit more people? Weren’t the educational opportunities already predominantly benefiting the middle and upper class (favoring upper class men over men with less money)? If it really is about poverty (and not an attempt to “blame” feminism) why is only one gender discussed when the actions of people of any gender are having an effect?

@MosesZD (comment #12): It always confuses me when people look at the effect a certain tradition, idea, etc. is having on the boys and ignore the effect on girls. Why is it considered undesirable if a woman gets a job over a man, but not considered undesirable (by some) if women don’t have any options to control their own lives?

Or, to put it differently: Willets is a fool if he thinks that a gender hierarchy is any more egalitarian than a class hierarchy. He’s a fool if he thinks “middle-class” and “working-class” people have separate economic and political interests but men and women don’t, and so middle-class people shutting out working-class people is somehow more of an evil than men shutting out women.

Men are assumed to be the default providers (one of the reasons I think everyone except the self aware phrase economic impact on how it impacts men) so women suffering is secondary. Afterall, it’s assumed they will get married and have a man to provide for them.

Ophelia: I don’t doubt that there was discrimination back then and I think some of it was already much more subtle than merely discouraging or opposing women from doing anything other than being housewives. I didn’t see too much of it myself, all I’m saying. Most of the girls I knew back then were looking forward to careers, and not just in teaching or nursing. My math and physics classes had at least as many women as men and they were well represented in the engineering school too although I think it possible that more were studying biology or chemistry – subjects that made my toes curl. When I was very young both my aunts had careers in the civil service, one in FO and the other in the HO (she got to assistant deputy minister)….my oldest female cousin got her PhD and did cancer & immune system research. I doubt that any of them took something away from any working-class men. Perhaps I was very fortunate to be surrounded by women who wouldn’t sit at the back of the bus and so didn’t see what was going on other places.

One thing Willetts doesn’t seem to remember though, is that there were far fewer Universities forty/fifty years ago and much less chance for anyone at all, especially working-class men OR women to go to university. Today the chances for such men to go to a university are much better than they were then.

Well, I know I’ll catch grief for this, but I think you’re beating this poor guy up over nothing. I mean, as I read it he goes out of his way several times to say he is not saying there is anything wrong with women taking these university and employment positions. His point is that compared to prior generations, there are more successful women and they tend to marry successful men resulting in a bigger divide between the families with two good incomes and the families with two lousy incomes or one lousy income or none at all. His point isn’t that women have “stolen” men’s jobs but that the social reality of female success makes it harder to close that income gap between families. He’s not focusing on gender income but household income. I don’t know if he is right or not, but if he is, the facts are the facts, they aren’t Willetts’ fault

If you see how gender-dominated certain sectors still are (construction, engineering for men, nursing and elementary teaching for women, etc), you can’t help but be skeptical about the premise that housewives are taking men’s jobs.

Both Felix and RRainsMD have actually understood what the man was saying. Everybody else has jumped on the sensational headline of the article and condemned him as an misogynist. Please read what he says more carefully. He did not say feminism is a bad thing, in fact I don’t think he’d have it any other way; he is saying that there are now problems with social mobility because of human nature.

Ah, “The Good Old Days”. I do so miss them, Gays being beaten up for fun, Paki bashing of a weekend followed by a hot curry, raping your wife because it was legal, paying women lower rates of pay for the same job, women not being allowed to do certain jobs just because of their sex, oh, life was sooo much better then wasn’t it?

Just in case anyone thinks I was being serious, that was intended as sarcasm and yes, I have read the posts and do understand that Mr Willets was trying to say that feminism has some side effects that no one thought of at the time, I just think that his way of doing so is rather misguided.

It is a pity that Willets was unable to acknowledge the previous Tory Government did so much to undermine those industries which traditionally employed the male working class. It really is quite a failure, since Willets was central to the development of policy under Thatcher that led to the demise of those industries. I think one of his two brains might have suffered a metldown.

@RRainsMD #25: “. . . as I read it he goes out of his way several times to say he is not saying there is anything wrong with women taking these university and employment positions.”

In which case there’s no value in him dwelling on the point – equal opportunities for women – that most recognize as good and necessary. Does he propose we ban women from all but menial work? If not, then he should just recognize the benefits of opening career opportunities to everyone, and move on.

I don’t know enough about Willetts, and I’m always suspicious of Tories, but it does seem to me that the negative reactions to what he says in the article are overboard. (I haven’t read his book, BTW, or anything he’s actually written on the subject himself—has anyone here?)

It sounds to me like he’s saying some things that do need to be said, and people are shooting the messenger.

I’m not saying that he doesn’t have an agenda that we wouldn’t like, but what h’es saying is worth considering.

Notice that where the article says that he blamed the entry of women into the workplace, that’s NOT a quote. He is pretty clearly saying that he thinks it’s an important causal factor, and trying NOT to cast that in terms of “blame” in the loaded sense—it’s not women’s fault, or feminism’s fault, that women want education and good jobs, too.

Where he IS directly quoted on the subject, he talks about the “entirely admirable transformation of opportunities for women.” (My emphasis, but his very explicit words.) When the reporter translates his talk of consequences changes as simply blaming, in the lead paragraph, that’s quite misleading.

Reading the article carefully, I don’t see anything to vilify Willetts for.

I say quite similar things myself, and I consider myself a feminist.

For example, it seems to me that one of the consequences of feminism has been a decline in the quality of public school teachers. When I was a kid, and in the generations before me that produced most of my teachers, many smart women went into public school teaching. These days, many of them would likely be doctors, layers, scientists, humanities professors, etc. I suspect that most of my favorite teachers—smart women—would not be public school teachers now. Kids these days don’t have as many smart women teachers.

Last time I looked at the figures for average GRE scores of test-takers saying which fields they planned to go to grad school in, education was second-to-lowest, and the only thing lower was physical education. That’s kinda scary, and worth understanding—even at the graduate level, the sharpest tools in the shed are mostly not going into education, and we have a bunch of education professionals who really don’t make the academic grade.

That’s important and worth talking about, even though obviously we shouldn’t go back to the bad old days and exploit smart women by ruling out other career options.

I think Willett is making an important point about assortative mating. It is true and important that people with advanced education tend to partner with other people with advanced education, and that’s likely a factor in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. From my liberal perspective, that’s all the more reason to be a liberal (in the US sense), and not a free-market fanatic. That’s a systematic bias that tends to stratify our society, and which must be opposed. It’s not reasonable to expect educated people not to find educated partners, and it’s not reasonable for less educated people, who therefore generally HAVE TO find their partners among a less-educated pool, to just accept that they’re doomed to be poor, because That’s How It Works.

If Matt’s right that Willett is the kind of conservative who’s not going to draw that kind of conclusion—who’d defend his past behavior in letting good jobs for people without advanced education disappear—then by all means point that out. And the reporter should have done so—getting quotes from people who point out the irony of his positions.

My major complaint is bad reporting. Maybe Willetts intenion is precisely to say things that will lead to blaming feminism, and not conservative economic and policies—but if so, give the evidence for that, don’t just lead with him just blaming feminism, with quotes that don’t bear out that interpretation.

Well it could be the case that the Telegraph paraphrased him inaccurately – but if it didn’t, then I don’t see that I’m misinterpreting him. He’s assuming that class inequality matters while gender inequality doesn’t, or doesn’t as much. He’s assuming that women are somehow supposed to be “housewives.”

For example, it seems to me that one of the consequences of feminism has been a decline in the quality of public school teachers. When I was a kid, and in the generations before me that produced most of my teachers, many smart women went into public school teaching. These days, many of them would likely be doctors, layers, scientists, humanities professors, etc. I suspect that most of my favorite teachers—smart women—would not be public school teachers now. Kids these days don’t have as many smart women teachers.

I know. I made the same point in a comment just the other day. I was doubly or triply lucky that way – I went to a tiny private girls’ school in Princeton, so I got all the PhD women who couldn’t get jobs at the eponymous university.

if all you are going on is what’s in the article then there is so little meat, so few direct quotes, that I can really say that you are painting the absolute worst picture that you can construe, without being able to substantiate it.

He’s assuming that class inequality matters while gender inequality doesn’t, or doesn’t as much. He’s assuming that women are somehow supposed to be “housewives.”

Nowhere in the article do I see him making a statement about valuing class equality over gender equality. And he doesn’t assume women are supposed to be housewives, he is highlighting the historical fact that it used to be prevailing opinion before the rise of feminism.

Ms. Benson blamed blamed the entry of women into the workplace and universities for the decreased quality of children’s education.

You should at least have noted that the former is “entirely admirable,” like Willetts. :-)

I did some googling and skimmed an op ed and a speech Willett, and it looks to me like Willett is getting a bit of a bum rap from both sides.

He thinks that the stagnation of class mobility in Britain in the last 40 years, relative to the progress in preceding decades, is largely due to the effects of feminism—priorities changed—but thinks you obviously have to hold onto that, and work on class mobility to.

His point is not to criticize women or feminism, or policies for sexual equality, but to say that the low class mobility in Britain IS still a problem, and must be addressed, too, including policies that reduce real biases against lower-class kids trying to move up.

One particular thing he says is that there’s are biases against working class kids in admissions that are NOT borne out by statistics about who gets a degree, and who gets a good degree—the working class kids who do get in do better than the rich kids with similar grades and test scores. He thinks that admissions policies should be changed to favor the working class kids, because they don’t reflect the truth that all other things being equal, working class kids are better students. (Maybe because they had to be smarter or work harder to achieve the same things, given an assortment of disadvantages.)

What he’s saying is not that we should undo feminism, but that we still have class bias to overcome, and we need affirmative action for lower class kids.

For that, the Daily Mail is saying he wants to be a “stalinist social engineer.” He’s way too progressive.

If the Daily Mail says something like that, he’s probably saying something right and true.

By the way, from what I’ve read, it’s not Willett who’s focusing on feminism as the cause of class mobility stagnation. He’s focused on various solutions, none of which involves going back the bad old days of discrimination against women.

One of his issues is that he thinks too many people think early childhood education is the most important thing, because those formative years are crucial. He says that yes, we should fund early childhood education, but it’s a myth that help is not needed at every level—students from worse backgrounds do in fact do well, on average, given more of a chance than they’re getting now in later stages of education, including college. You can’t fund early childhood education and think that’s the best you can do, and expect poor kids to fend for themselves after that in a meritocracy. (Partly because what’s really going on is NOT really a meritocracy, as many of his fellow Tories would tell you.)

He is saying some progressive things that a lot of Tories don’t want to hear—he’s saying that it’s not true that poor kids failing to move up is their own damned fault, and that there’s nothing the government should be doing about it.

At the bottom line, it might be mostly a smokescreen, or used as one by his fellow Tories. His statements about poor kids being able to overcome early disadvantages at every stage of the educational system may just be used as an excuse to cut early childhood education, rather than fixing the later problems that he says are real and serious.

Likewise, his statements about sexual equality—and explanation of what changed and why—may be used by fellow conservatives as ammo against feminism, rather than ammo for progressively addressing class problems in education.

I don’t know enough details to know if that’s really what he intends—e.g., that sexual equality and early childhood education be sacrificed for class-based progressiveness—but it’s not what he’s overtly saying.

By the way, the quote about why class mobility stagnated in britain, “blaming” sexual equality, was in response to a direct question. I don’t think it’s a major message of his—it’s something he doesn’t necessarily mention, and if he mentions it, it’s on the way to explaining why we still need to address class mobility with progressive policies in admissions and such.

I think this guy is being quote-mined by the media. They’re ignoring his main message, which is progressive (Except for the righties, who just hate it.)

It may be that in the big picture, he deserves it—maybe he would sacrifice women’s equality and early childhood admissions for affirmative action and for poor kids getting into college, or something like that, when it comes down to making budgets. But if so, that’s the kind of argument that needs to be made—that he wants it to be a forced choice with a conservative budgetary axe, or that even if he personally is sincere, that’s inevitably what a conservative government will do.

I can really say that you are painting the absolute worst picture that you can construe, without being able to substantiate it.

I’m citing what’s in the article. If the paraphrase is accurate, he said “that women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men.”

Maybe the paraphrase is not accurate; journalists are often shockingly bad at paraphrase; but I am for now taking the paraphrase as written. If we learn that he didn’t say that, I’ll amend.

By the way, one of Willetts’ examples that I like—but which he doesn’t bring out the significance of nearly as much as I’d like—is a relatively well-off class kid who’d rather be a stonemason than go to college and become an administrator.

I take the message to be that people who’ve more or less “made it” shouldn’t have strong expectations that their kids will not be DOWNWARDLY mobile—the resistance to downward mobility is part of the problem of class stagnation. Some relatively rich kids whose parents went to college shouldn’t be going to college, so that relatively poor kids who really should go can. Not all kids can be above average, and a lot of the wrong kids are being artifically kept up, which keeps others down.

No wonder the Daily Mail thinks he’s a Stalinist. He’s challenging middle class values, and implying that they should accept that if you let the poor win sometimes, the rich are going to lose sometimes, and it might well be them, and that’s only fair.

I agree that he said the wrong thing, kinda stupidly, but I think it’s sorta understandable and can easily imagine fully feminist lefties saying the same thing, especially when they’re talking about historical developments, which he was.

If you think about traditional pre-feminist ideas of egalite, they’re mainly about class and sex is not problematized. It’s a false dichotomy, but a common one of historical importance.

He’s saying that when women’s equality became a big issue and people did things about it, they forgot or de-prioritized about the kind of egalite they’d been working to address, successfully, in the preceding few decades, and they mostly missed a crucial connection between the two. There WAS a competition, if only for mind-share and priorities, between the issues of sex and the issues of class.

People forgot about traditional values like class warfare. :-)

I think he’s right, and it’s a valid critique of the “left” and of society in general to say that too often, we’ve failed to remember that class is still a problem, and do something about it, while dealing with other very important problems. It happens.

If you read what he actually says about these things, it’s really clear that he’s saying that it was entirely admirable that we did something substantive about one problem, but bad that we didn’t do enough about the other problem, and let it get WORSE largely due to an interaction between the two, and that we should bite the bullet and fix the latter problem WITHOUT undoing the fix to the first, which it aggravated.

That’s why the Daily Mail’s headline screams that he’s a Stalinist. He’s saying class problems are real, and unfair, and not going away, and they are something the government should do something about, even if that means goring the oxen of some well-off people who assume they should stay that way, and that rich women should not move down so that poor men can move up—some rich people of both sexes are going to have to move down, so that poor people of both sexes can move up. And class is still going to be a problem, due to (non-)assortative mating—we’re still going to have rich and poor families, and have to keep doing something about that, too.

Good on him. It’s good to see a Tory admitting that lefties are right.

Yes, that’s why there’s more inequality today than there was 40 years ago: women entering the work force. Don’t forget the darkies and the immigrants while we’re at it!

Or we could acknowledge that class warfare has been waged very successfully by the wealthy over the past 40 years, and part of that strategy has been convincing the lower class that [insert other demographic here] are the real enemies.

For the US, it’s been mostly convincing working class whites that the blacks (and the Mexicans) (and ohmygod it’s two dudes kissing over there, look while I make sure GE pays no taxes!!) are getting unfair benefits and keepin’ them down. Attacks on strident women who don’t know their place is part of that, too.

Yes, that’s why there’s more inequality today than there was 40 years ago: women entering the work force. Don’t forget the darkies and the immigrants while we’re at it.

Are you implying that Willetts is actually saying that sort of thing? He’s saying more the opposite sort of thing—that problems of classism are important, and government must do progressive things about it. (It’s not a matter of women wrongly taking men’s jobs—sexism is wrong—but of rich people not letting poor people take “their” jobs when the poor people are in fact more able and deserving.) See my earlier comments.

It was more of a response to how his words were reported; the article makes it sound like that is what he was implying. I did follow the conversation y’all had about whether or not that was what he actually said, but I couldn’t resist the urge to snark (especially since that is the usual Tory perspective)

No wonder the Daily Mail thinks he’s a Stalinist. He’s challenging middle class values, and implying that they should accept that if you let the poor win sometimes, the rich are going to lose sometimes, and it might well be them, and that’s only fair.

Only part of the story though. How big tomorrow’s cake will be depends in great part on how today’s cake is divided. By the 18th C in Europe, the rich were not only supremely powerful, but locked into a bizarre competition over who had the most sumptuous palace, the biggest estate, ballroom, number of servants, etc, etc. Every bit of gilding on a baroque ceiling or gargoyle on a cathedral represented an investment diverted that could have educated someone, improved urban sanitation et cetera.

The modern West is back into that game with a vengeance, and income differentials are widening, not shrinking, leading to similar misallocations of resources. As I see it, what Willetts is up to is an attempt at creating a diversion.

themann086 is on the money, IMHO:

Or we could acknowledge that class warfare has been waged very successfully by the wealthy over the past 40 years, and part of that strategy has been convincing the lower class that [insert other demographic here] are the real enemies.

Egalitarian Tories are either as mythical as unicorns and griffins, or a totally extinct species.

The modern West is back into that game with a vengeance, and income differentials are widening, not shrinking, leading to similar misallocations of resources. As I see it, what Willetts is up to is an attempt at creating a diversion.

Why do you say that? It seems to me that if you ignore the sound bites that the press chooses (some of them paraphrased) and actually read what the guy’s saying, it’s clear he’s saying things that the Tories in general refuse to say. He’s saying that the classism problem is serious, and not going away, and that the government must do something about it, and it can’t be to blame the uppity women—it must be to acknowledge that the rich are compounding their benefits, in clearly very important, understandable ways that most people don’t yet recognize, and to actually do something about that.

He’s actually saying that there’s are policy problems and a serious structural problem that allow the rich to keep getting richer and impoverish everyone else, and government intervention is needed.

It’s disturbing to me that the Daily Mail seems to get what he’s really saying—and naturally deny it vehemently and call him names—and the more progressive press is completely distracted by the manufactuversy of him “blaming” it on women, and shooting the messenger who’s actually bringing them a telling progressive critique of the status quo.

The Daily Mail is right that he’s a traitor betraying the Tory cause and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. But the more progressive press is missing the boat and vilifying him as a sexist pig. They’re totally missing the real story, and it’s a much better more important story than some Tory being a sexist asshole—who’d be surprised by that, and what would it change? This is a Tory delivering a Tory study explaining how Tories are wrong about class and income inequality. That’s news.

[Willetts believes the Tories’ aim ]… must be to acknowledge that the rich are compounding their benefits, in clearly very important, understandable ways that most people don’t yet recognize, and to actually do something about that.

You may choose to read that into it, but how you get there is beyond me.

From the Daily Mail article:

Asked to identify the cause of the decline, Mr Willetts said: ‘One of the things that happened over that period was that the entirely admirable transformation of opportunities for women meant that with a lot of the expansion of education in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the first beneficiaries were the daughters of middle-class families who had previously been excluded from educational opportunities.

‘And if you put that with what is called assortative mating – that well-educated women marry well-educated men – this transformation of opportunities for women ended up magnifying social divides rather than narrowing them.

‘It is such delicate territory because it is not a bad thing that women had these opportunities.

‘But I think it certainly widened the gap in household incomes because you suddenly had two-earner couples, both of whom were well educated, compared with often workless households where nobody was educated.”

Feminism was about nothing if it was not about a fight for sex equality. In the same breath Willetts says that “feminism trumped egalitarianism.”

The serious trump of egalitarianism today does not ccome from feminism. Granted that the historic rise in education across society was never even, but one would be a fool to think that Willetts is ignorant of his own party’s history, and that its whole reason for existing is to celebrate and perpetuate class inequality. If he is in favour of egalitarianism, what on Earth is he doing in the Tory Party?

The big inequality that Willetts and his ilk worldwide show a remarkable reluctance to tackle is income and wealth-ownership differentials, which show every sign of being in a positive feedback loop, just as they were in past periods of gross inequality. The salaries of the upper corporate layer have taken off like a brushfire up an ever-steepening slope, and from similar causality: the salaries of those ‘independent’ identities like company directors and their hired consultants are themselves a function of the salaries paid to the executive elite. The more the upper execs get paid, the more the directors and consultants get paid. Thus they keep rising, even if stock prices and profits are in free fall.

Incomes fit more or less into a skewed bell curve, with the conservative parties of the western world doing what they can to skew it progressively further in favour of the wealthy, while retaining as much middle-class support as possible. In this cause, they preach trickle-down economics in whatever tarted-up form best suits that purpose.

The Labour Party in Britain and its counterparts elsewhere have been set up for the opposite purpose: to redistribute in favour of the lower middle and working classes. But as is well known, their achievements and resolve in this area are chequered at best, and their politicians more easily corrupted (ie diverted from their cause) than are those of the Tories.

Poor guy. Try to say something complicated, get both sides jumping on you.

Of course ‘feminism’, as actually practised over the last 30 years, ‘trumped egalitarianism’, because that ‘actually existing feminism’ means, in practice, some individual women having the same opportunities as some individual men to get rich. AEF is not the transformation of society that the radicals of the ‘second wave’ wanted, it just lets managerial capitalism fish in a slightly larger pool of talent for the top jobs, while everyone else has been made to get used to the idea that both people in a couple have to work in order to bring in a tolerable income.

I doubt that a Tory cabinet minister would put it quite like that, but it doesn’t make him wrong to notice there’s a problem.

Ian, how I got there is by reading what the man actually says—e.g., an op ed and the transcript of a speech about the education policy report that triggered all this. (I don’t know if it was the exact same speech he gave at the event where the Q-and-A triggered all this sensationalist reporting.)

It’s very, very different from what’s being reported in the press.

From what I’ve read of what Willetts is actually saying about education policy and class problems generally, he’s not the baddie. He’s a fucking hero, pointing out that his own side is seriously wrong, and he’s getting crucified.

See my earlier comments about the “trumping” remark. In the context of the historical explanation of the problems that he’s giving, it makes perfect sense. They are traditionally treated as different issues, even if one is really a specific version of the other—-and as he himself stresses, they’re NOT independent problems. Addressing sexism without addressing classism has aggravated the latter, amplifying the tendency toward inherited privilege. Rich people are getting extra benefits, by not only getting more money, but getting to marry more money.

That’s just true, isn’t it? Isn’t that how it works? How could it not? And isn’t it important?

If you’re attacking him because he’s a Tory, you don’t know who your friends are. Tories aren’t all wrong on every issue, and this exceptional guy is right on this one, with a message everybody needs to understand.

For fuck’s sake, he’s telling Tories that they should stop whining about poor people taking “their” educational opportunities and “their” jobs, and that more of that sort of thing needs to happen, and that the government ought to make damned sure it does.

The big inequality that Willetts and his ilk worldwide show a remarkable reluctance to tackle is income and wealth-ownership differentials, which show every sign of being in a positive feedback loop, just as they were in past periods of gross inequality.

Read what Willetts actually says. He’s saying what you’re saying. He’s saying that the rich get richer and the poor get screwed, and clearly explaining important feedback loops that let the rich compound their advantages. That’s his main message.

Why is he a Tory? Fuck if I know, but if he keeps saying what he’s saying now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they toss him out. If a lot of people start understanding and agreeing with him, I’d be shocked if they didn’t.

It’s just depressing that the Daily Mail can understand what he’s actually saying, and recognize him as their enemy, but nobody else can recognize him as their friend. Pathetic.

Of course ‘feminism’, as actually practised over the last 30 years, ‘trumped egalitarianism’, because that ‘actually existing feminism’ means, in practice, some individual women having the same opportunities as some individual men to get rich.

But egalitarianism doesn’t mean just “having equal incomes” – does it? It’s certainly news to me if it does.

And “actually existing feminism” emphatically does not mean just some individual women having the same opportunities as some individual men to get rich. It means quite a lot more than that.

It ought to, and in the minds of the tiny minority of people still prepared to own the term ‘feminism’ perhaps it does, but in practice, in the way social institutions have incorporated allegedly ‘feminist’ goals, it doesn’t. Feminism has catastrophically failed in its objectives of actually altering the way society functions towards a more fully egalitarian model; and along the way ‘feminist’ has become a term of scorn. Men and women are slightly more economically equal than they were 40 years ago, but only slightly. Meanwhile, as I know from the opinions of my own students, tragically deluded creatures that they are, feminism is ‘over’ – all that it could possibly hope to achieve has been achieved, everyone is a perfectly equal little individual, ‘gender’ is not something one even needs to think about… Ack, spit.

I don’t agree that feminism has simply failed in those objectives though. I certainly wouldn’t say it has succeeded either, in the sense that we now have perfection; but I would say it has improved some things. Only some things, only some improvement, but not nothing.

The Tory party only exists to maintain, justify and celebrate upper and middle class privilege, and to distribute wealth in their favour. If Willetts wants to end all that, he is in the wrong party. I’m surprised if what you say is true that he has not already had a tap on the shoulder and a recieivedly pronounced word in his shell-pink.

The major issue in Britain at the moment, and the elephant in the parlour, is the lunatic government program of spending cuts, which apart from other economic effects is going to cost lower and middle income earners heavily in terms of their kids’ educations. Willetts appears to me to be banging on about a side issue, and rather clumsily at that. As Universities Minister he is ignoring that elephant put in the academic parlour by his own party.

The Daily Mail and the Telegraph reports were similar enough. I am disinclined to go searching in primary sources such as parliamentary speeches, Willetts’ own website if there is one, or whatever you might have seen, in order to track down the subtleties of what Willetts might have meant or said.

I regard the extent of his potential detorification as inherently limited.